The subarray division for the phase array radar

Abstract

As the dramatic development in the array signal processing, the phase array radar is widely used. The phase array radar is more flexible in beamforming since we just need to adapt the phase shift to change the direction of beamforming. However, it is always a huge cost of hardware resources since each antenna antenna element needs its own receiving path. Therefore, the phase array radar should be divided into subarrays and each subarray has one receive path. It is very difficult to maintain good performance of the phase array radar after the subarray division. In this paper, we propose a novel subarray division method which is based on the genetic algorithm. The proposed method helps to divide the subarrays and maintain good mainlobe for the expected signal and low sidelobe for the interference suppression. In addition, the simulation results are given to show our proposed method has good performance in the antenna pattern and reduce the hardware cost dramatically.